Goldman's study is an extension of historians' interest in the relationship between the Stalinist campaign for "democracy" in 1936-37 and the Great Terror, which began with limited arrests in 1936 and expanded dramatically in 1937-38.

I think the first thing to note from her study is that participation of workers and low-ranking Party officials in the Terror needed to be coerced. There was little interest in mass participation in the 1936 show trial and post-Kirov assassination hunt for "hidden" Trotskyites. As a result, senior Party leaders were directed to use measures to mobilize local Party committees by force and silence dissent and foot-dragging. The boundaries of "bottom-up" participation were set to align with the goals the central leadership was pursuing and local activism was pushed forcefully in that direction.

She then looks at the introduction of certain changes to local elections in early 1937 - multiple candidates, secret ballots, etc. - and how they related to the leadership's goals of organizing support for repression and eliciting mass participation. These along with repression certainly led to major shakeups in local leadership, though many of those removed from office simply cycled into a different position within the local apparat. But changes in leadership didn't yield any changes in policies that workers hoped to achieve - fairer management, better wages, housing improvements, etc. Changes in leadership didn't mean changes in industrial policy or a bigger voice for workers in their factories, much less the wider government. Even the formal measures of "democratization" such as multi-candidate elections were quickly removed, often before implementation. These measures were aimed at mobilizing support for Terror and doing away with leaders the leadership felt were lax in their duties, but they were never democratic in any real sense.

I think the biggest flaw in the book is that Goldman doesn't establish a relationship between denunciation and arrest in the Terror, while research since it was published was actually underscored that popular denunciation had little relevance to who the NKVD arrested during the Terror.

The Terror was divided into several discrete processes. Beginning in 1936 there was a widespread hunt for Trotskyites in the government, limited in scope and scale. Then in Winter-Spring 1936-37 this escalated into a broader hunt for enemies within the Party leadership and state bureaucracy, eventually extending to the military in June 1937.

Then in July 1937 Stalin escalated the Terror again with the "mass operations", moving from thousands of victims to hundreds of thousands. Regional leaders, in cooperation with the NKVD, were ordered to send estimates of the number of "enemies" in their administrative subdivision. These enemies were initially identified as former Kulaks, clergy, recidivist criminals, and any other "socially dangerous elements" who should be targeted. Eventually, specific nationalities were also targeted for repression. These numbers were divided into Category 1 - execution - and Category 2 - imprisonment.

After these numbers were reviewed, sometimes to be revised upward or downward, instructions were sent out to the regions to arrest the number of people listed and punish them based on their category. Troikas were formed, including the regional NKVD chief, the Party leader, and the Chief Procurator or deputy Party leader, that had the right to sentence individuals in absentia without a trial, usually simply signing off on "albums" of dozens or hundreds of people each day without even cursory review of the individual cases. Arrests were to begin in August 1937.

Operational conferences of district and regional NKVD bosses and their deputies were then organized by the leadership to emphasize target selection of "socially dangerous elements" and the methods to be used in arresting and convicting them, particularly widespread torture. Staff members who refused to show appropriate "vigilance" and use torture were disciplined, expelled from the Party, and often arrested themselves.

Access to NKVD materials now gives us a pretty good idea of how the process then developed. The NKVD initially chose individuals based on its catalogue of people under surveillance or suspicion. However, these files were quickly exhausted without even coming close to fulfilling the original arrest numbers. Immense downward pressure by the leadership to show appropriate "vigilance" by sending requests to arrest more people than originally identified further increased the NKVD's workload.

The main method used by the NKVD to quickly identify large numbers of additional victims was to torture arrestees until they signed off on "confessions" naming dozens of additional "conspirators", usually friends and family, or even blank sheets of paper which would be filled in later. Each NKVD department also had a "character witness" under their employ who would sign off on pre-prepared lists of people to be arrested. The NKVD also carried out mass roundups on the streets and in markets at random, torturing those arrestees for additional victims. In many cases the NKVD would arrest its own secret informants simply because it already had their names on file.

NKVD investigators worked virtually round-the-clock torturing, getting confessions, and then arresting new victims to be tortured. There was no time to keep track of all those arrested (In one particularly grim case, one man was forgotten in a prison cell for 14 months before he was disposed of), much less follow up on even a minority of the denunciations the public vigilance campaigns elicited. In most cases the NKVD received far more names on "confessions" than it actually ended up arresting - one victim in Vinnytsia named 200 people of whom just 40 were arrested.

Denunciations, in large part, weren't necessary to meet arrest quotas and required more effort than the NKVD cared to expend. This was particularly true even before the Terror - denunciations by ordinary people were never a core part of the NKVD's investigate work.

So Goldman misses the mark by overstating the importance of denunciations and accusations. The campaign to elicit denunciations and criticism of leaders was designed to mobilize mass support for the Terror, not to identify its victims. The NKVD's process of torturing suspects to denounce their friends, colleagues, and family members and then repeating the process with new victims had little need for public "assistance".

As was the case everywhere in the Stalinist system, democracy and mass participation were a smokescreen to mobilize support for state policies without any influence on the actual levers of power. Goldman's study is very important to examine how the regime forcefully organized support for the Terror, but it doesn't look at the "real" mechanisms of repression.

So historiography over the past 20 years has emphasized how centralized the Terror was and disconnected from "bottom-up" influence. While local NKVD departments had their own unique practices and different regions chose different targets (In many cities recidivist criminals, even alcoholics and the homeless, were major targets), the actual machinery of the Terror didn't have much room for popular participation.

Sources:

Binner, R., and Йunge, M. «Через трупы врага на благо народа». «Кулацкая операция» в Украинской ССР 1937-1941 гг.

Bonvech, B., Сталинизм в советской провинции: 1937–1938 гг. Массовая операция на основе приказа № 00447

Hagenloh, P., Stalin's Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR

Shearer, D., Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953

Vatlin, A., Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police

Viola, L., Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine